The hook: In Heroes of Loot 2 you control two characters at once, a ranged character and a melee character. Switching between the characters is as simple as switching between weapons. Besides the difference in range, the characters all have their advantages and disadvantages. These range between difference in speed, power for using magic spells, or amount of damage they can handle. Pick your characters based on your preferred game-style!

The influence: As with the original Heroes of Loot, the sequel is mostly based on the game feel of the original 80’s Gauntlet game. However for the sequel I took a lot of influence from games like Zelda, God of War and Darksiders to inspire the new quests, puzzles, and hack and slash parts of the gameplay.

Gameplay: The main game mode comes with 50 procedurally generated levels. Making each game a unique experience. Each dungeon comes with a lot of hell-creatures to shoot, mini-bosses, avatars to talk to and possibly buy cool items from or learn alternate routes like the “The sewers” and many more. You’ll also find yourself in a single-level Arena room filled with multiple Minotaurs, or just a loot-filled room.. In any case, make sure you are equiped for the right task!

All dungeons also have various quests and challenges for you to complete before you can continue your path to King Loot’s lair. Quests range from killing a mini-boss to lighting various magic-candles, or retrieving a lost Idol to an Altar.

Luckily the dungeons come with shops where you can buy magic spells, character enhancing items, and healing potions to help you on your quest.

Grabbing loot and killing hell-spawn adds to your Experience points, increasing the firepower and magic power of your characters.

And finally, you can find various treasures around the dungeons to unlock “magic shards”. Collect enough of these shards to permanently unlock magic spells making your future game sessions easier.

Game modes: Grab a controller and a buddy for local-coop mode and roam the dungeons together. If you’re good enough you can also try your luck in the Survival mode, a bunch of small Arena’s that play much like the old SmashTV arcade game.. How long can you survive?

More heroes! the roster of heroes now doubled to 8 characters.. but you'll have to unlock them first Unlocking is done by collecting the new Hero-cards that are scattered around the dungeons, and the Stats/Data menu shows how many you have and need.

With unlocking the Hero-cards there is also some extra information on your character unlocked, so go for it! Besides that there are some new achievements and a host of fixes and improvements!

I don’t get it, what wrong with this world…Is game at least profitable? (can you pay bills?)

good question, so just some extra info on top of those numbers:

iOS has 7000+ sales

Steam has only 8 reviews with around 300 sales (note: most of my sales come from other sites like itch.io and humble, so it's possibly the reason that a bunch of those players don't even check the steam page of the game let alone leave a review)

- my games aren't free downloads but premium games for a niche market (pixel-art looks, targeting mid to hardcore gamers, not extremely deep gameplay but enough extra layers for the real fans of the game). So even with good coverage and featuring, it's still a hard sell to many players in between the hundreds of NEW free game offerings every day.

however, even with these "low" numbers (after a month of being on sale), the game is what I consider profitableI made the game in little over 5 months (which I admit is an extremely short dev time, even for me).

only costs for the game have been the music, which I outsource, but all other stuff: graphics, code, marketing, trailer creation, etc. is done by me.. so no extra costs involved in the process.

The game has now made little over 15k in that first month of being on sale,and generated extra sales on my other games (including Heroes of Loot 1 obviously)

The game will continue selling for a few more years at a rate of a few copies a dayand there will be some deals left and right like bundles, sales, and other deals with tablet manufacturers, walled-garden type deals, etc.

Obviously this is not a success-story that everybody loves reading about and all media talks aboutbut this is actually what a sustainable business looks like (nearing 13 years of being full-time indie game dev).

I keep my game-dev cycles between 5-9 months, and I release on as many platforms as possibleand on initial release I make sure to at least target the main ones: iOS, Android and since last year also PC.

(I released my previous game Space Grunts in January/February which did about the same)

The PC side of things is still a new venture for me, I started porting my older games last year and getting them on Steam just to feel out the market and learn how to improve my games for the PC market, and with the development of Space Grunts and Heroes of Loot 2 I actually had the PC version as the main build for the first time in all those years.

So I'm still in the process of building up a fan-base, learning what works and what not, etc. Again, it's not an overnight-hit story, it's how you build a sustainable business, a long-term goal.

In that short year of being on PC and Steam the monthly PC income is now at 50% of my monthly mobile income (as-in the monthly income without having a newly released game). So it's growing rapidly, mostly due to the higher sales price obviously that I can set on PC.

Do you feel confident and try to boost your sale, I mean, working on a bigger title, invest in better graphics, marketing and so on ? What are your plans ?

Isn't he doing that already? That is adding Steam and PC to increase the Total Addressable Market?

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In that short year of being on PC and Steam the monthly PC income is now at 50% of my monthly mobile income (as-in the monthly income without having a newly released game). So it's growing rapidly, mostly due to the higher sales price obviously that I can set on PC.

Do you feel confident and try to boost your sale, I mean, working on a bigger title, invest in better graphics, marketing and so on ? What are your plans ?

Always looking for new ways, like adding new platforms is one (like Steam, itch.io, etc). Same with things like the Ouya, or many other androidTV devices that most of us will never have, own, or want, but I do release my games on there as it's often just 1 or 2 days work since these things all run the same platform.

As for bigger games, I honestly don't think a one-man company like me should do bigger games. And I wouldn't dare to try it.

Working 9 months on a game is already stretching it pretty much as to what the costs are if you do this full time with no other income. (my games are also the main income for me and my girlfriend).

If a game takes 4-6 months, and it fails, my current range of games will make sure there is money coming in and I can do a new game, even if it's just a sequel or a re-skinning of one of my existing games.

If a game takes 9 months (meaning that's close to a year before you see money coming in) and if it then fails to deliver.. I could survive that, but it will make it a lot harder on the next game, no matter how fast I can make them.

I'm in the fortunate position of not having to do work-for-hire anymore, my always growing catalog of games are sustaining me and I have a more then decent income from them. Last year I released only 1 new game, and this year I magically managed to release 2 fairly big games and now my next game won't have to be released until 2017, which is a very nice luxury.

As for marketing, I've looked at various indie marketing companies, and their prices range from $2000 up to $5000 for fairly basic stuff (contact press, streamers, influencers, etc), but so far I just found it very hard to judge how good these marketing companies are and if they are worth that sum. It's hard to track what they bring to the table.

I also contacted publishers with various games in recent years, but never found one that was interested in the game or they didn't have a time-slot for it, or they simply weren't looking for such games at that time (or any other silly excuse they made).

As for my plans, with every game I release I learn new things and try new things, from coding a better level-generator to game-design improvements on how to handle stuff like tutorials, hints, or tricks for camera-movements.

I now started a completely new thing, a sandbox type game (which I never play or even like) mixed with original GTA car-driving, mad-max vibes, etc. No idea if it will be the next game, but it's a working prototype for now.

While doing prototypes I keep very obvious idea's in the back of my head: Gunslugs 3, Heroes of Loot 3, Space grunts 2, etc.. those are great fallback idea's when a prototype fails and time is ticking out on a new launch. Altho I only do a sequel if I think I can really bring something new to the game or improve on it in some meaningful ways.

I even not expected to get such exact numbers.it definitely helps, as many new game developers are blinded by the success of Minecraft ^^(they think every game is making millions )

yeah I think it would be better if many of the other developers, that nobody reads about, would get more attention. We all read about the 5-10 awesome hit games each year, and the massive failures.

But there's a group of "indie devs" out there that is making a living without ever writing a hit game. It takes a lot of work, and probably requires a lot of business instincts, but it's do-able without making those millions on just one game.

Always looking for new ways, like adding new platforms is one (like Steam, itch.io, etc). Same with things like the Ouya, or many other androidTV devices that most of us will never have, own, or want, but I do release my games on there as it's often just 1 or 2 days work since these things all run the same platform.

What about time spent on resolving bugs?

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As for bigger games, I honestly don't think a one-man company like me should do bigger games. And I wouldn't dare to try it.Working 9 months on a game is already stretching it pretty much as to what the costs are if you do this full time with no other income. (my games are also the main income for me and my girlfriend).If a game takes 4-6 months, and it fails, my current range of games will make sure there is money coming in and I can do a new game, even if it's just a sequel or a re-skinning of one of my existing games.If a game takes 9 months (meaning that's close to a year before you see money coming in) and if it then fails to deliver.. I could survive that, but it will make it a lot harder on the next game, no matter how fast I can make them.

It's a good point, at least for full time indie developer out there like you. I'm aware of that limit and I think part of your success or other people success is you must confront with real market and real customers, like a good lean startup

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I'm in the fortunate position of not having to do work-for-hire anymore, my always growing catalog of games are sustaining me and I have a more then decent income from them. Last year I released only 1 new game, and this year I magically managed to release 2 fairly big games and now my next game won't have to be released until 2017, which is a very nice luxury.

Why do you decided to release a turn based game ? It's a tough choice for me

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As for marketing, I've looked at various indie marketing companies, and their prices range from $2000 up to $5000 for fairly basic stuff (contact press, streamers, influencers, etc), but so far I just found it very hard to judge how good these marketing companies are and if they are worth that sum. It's hard to track what they bring to the table.

I also contacted publishers with various games in recent years, but never found one that was interested in the game or they didn't have a time-slot for it, or they simply weren't looking for such games at that time (or any other silly excuse they made).

For what I understand about this topic, there is a lot of work behind and a lot of "marketing" companies are not partner in your business, but for them you are a customer, nothing more

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As for my plans, with every game I release I learn new things and try new things, from coding a better level-generator to game-design improvements on how to handle stuff like tutorials, hints, or tricks for camera-movements.

I now started a completely new thing, a sandbox type game (which I never play or even like) mixed with original GTA car-driving, mad-max vibes, etc. No idea if it will be the next game, but it's a working prototype for now.

It's time share with us Mad max sandbox games where old-style lone warrior fight against the world, enemies? Sounds really cool! With your pixel style even more!

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While doing prototypes I keep very obvious idea's in the back of my head: Gunslugs 3, Heroes of Loot 3, Space grunts 2, etc.. those are great fallback idea's when a prototype fails and time is ticking out on a new launch. Altho I only do a sequel if I think I can really bring something new to the game or improve on it in some meaningful ways.

This is a good point. I'm a hobbyist right now so working on a sequel is something I don't want to do: experiment with new things is right choice when you don't have too much time. But seems, following your experience, that improve every game (codebase, graphics, gameplay, effect, etc..) is right choice to me. A lot of work and motivations behind btw !

Porting to other platform, especially when you don't have to port to another language but can use the same Java build, is mostly just a couple of days hunting platform specific bugs. Often that's interface and hardware things, not a lot of work. If it is, there's a business decision to make: is it worth the time is you must confront with real market and real customers, like a good lean startup

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Why do you decided to release a turn based game ? It's a tough choice for me

a few people challenged me to it I never liked turn-based+statistics+inventory stuff, but doing the research and building a unique game that is both turn-based but fast and action packed was a nice challenge and made me actually enjoy a couple of turn-based games.

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This is a good point. I'm a hobbyist right now so working on a sequel is something I don't want to do: experiment with new things is right choice when you don't have too much time. But seems, following your experience, that improve every game (codebase, graphics, gameplay, effect, etc..) is right choice to me. A lot of work and motivations behind btw !

Thanks!

Yes, I can recommend iteration on your previous games, never throw away old code but build on it

I also contacted publishers with various games in recent years, but never found one that was interested in the game or they didn't have a time-slot for it, or they simply weren't looking for such games at that time (or any other silly excuse they made).

What about PM princec(Cas) And make nice Site with published GamesIt cost almost nothing, we also can add other nice finished games there - from java-gaming,Its not market site – small preview site with 10-50 games and direct links where buy them

java-gaming also nice promo site – but its forum and its little overflow projects in dev

Yes its looks stupid and unprofitable – But again its cost nothing (10-20 $ hosting)+if all members set same site link on description of published games it may help to promo, At least little ^^(and please don't put adwords on new site )

As for marketing, I've looked at various indie marketing companies, and their prices range from $2000 up to $5000 for fairly basic stuff (contact press, streamers, influencers, etc), but so far I just found it very hard to judge how good these marketing companies are and if they are worth that sum. It's hard to track what they bring to the table.

I think you can try Google AdWords – but its something like gamblingYou spend 1-2$ for adwords in hope that ppl after watching it and click - buy game for 3-4$,Many big companies make millions on it..At least you can try – spend 10-20$ and see result – google have nice statistic for clicks and conversion(buys)

I don’t get it, what wrong with this world…Is game at least profitable? (can you pay bills?)

1000-5000 sales on Android is not a small amount for a game with this price. Don't get me wrong, the price is not to high, but most android games are for free (with ads or premium) and most others cost less then 2€.So for an Android Game the price is quite high and many users don't pay that much for a mobile game...

On Steam instead it seems like there are more and more pixel-art indie games and some of them gain quite some interest.

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